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You know... it was also good.
Probably should have posted this review 2 years ago.
True facts: I did not understand all the Jewish stuff :(
I can't do 3.5 stars, eh? I lean towards 4 cuz I liked it, but IDK if a lot of other people would like it.
Wong is a journalist born and raised in Montréal, whose family owned a restaurant in the Snowdon/Décarie area to my recollection, about my mom's age. Circa the '70s, she became a Maoist and moved to China. Like Emma, she was disillusioned, but unlike Emma, she heelturned completely on any kind of revolutionary imaginary as far as I can tell. This comes through if you ever listened to her talk to Jesse Brown on Canadaland Short Cuts.
I picked this up at a used book store a few years ago, but never cracked it open until earlier this year. Every chapter is laser-focused on a broad subject matter of one kind or another, and it weaves together anecdotes from her time in China as a youth, …
I can't do 3.5 stars, eh? I lean towards 4 cuz I liked it, but IDK if a lot of other people would like it.
Wong is a journalist born and raised in Montréal, whose family owned a restaurant in the Snowdon/Décarie area to my recollection, about my mom's age. Circa the '70s, she became a Maoist and moved to China. Like Emma, she was disillusioned, but unlike Emma, she heelturned completely on any kind of revolutionary imaginary as far as I can tell. This comes through if you ever listened to her talk to Jesse Brown on Canadaland Short Cuts.
I picked this up at a used book store a few years ago, but never cracked it open until earlier this year. Every chapter is laser-focused on a broad subject matter of one kind or another, and it weaves together anecdotes from her time in China as a youth, her time as the Globe and Mail's China correspondent from 1988 to 1994 (the bulk comes from this period), and finally from a more recent trip to the country, in 1999, when she says that she slipped through apparently minimal border security at Hong Kong. Apparently she thought she'd be denied entry due to her criticisms of the regime if she arrived by plane.
She talks about a range of things: Tiananmen, the work culture, the arrival of cars (she talks a lot about how in Beijing in the '70s, everyone biked everywhere), various awful things that people would do to one another, numerous disgusting habits and behaviours, what it was like to be gay in China in circa 1990 and circa 1999, the experience of Jewish communists who moved there in the '70s and were still living there, etc.
It's a pretty fascinating look. Of course, she totally thinks that the regime is going to go the way of the Soviet Union within 5 to 6 years (to be fair, she is never that precise with it, but that's the vibe) because she has a completely naïve 1990s idea about the internet, and she believes capitalism and the rule of the Communist Party are ultimately incompatible. Didn't happen that way, lol!
I definitely learned a lot of shit I didn't know, tho. And like, her observations are neutral enough, and her bias obvious enough, that one can reach one's own conclusions with ease. Pretty sure a tankie would pop a blood vessel tho
@Leaving_Marx oh shit what'd you think
I am roughly backdating when I started reading this. It's been slow-going.
I finished this book two days ago! It was a marathon.
I liked it. It definitely explained a lot more about this guy than I ever knew before, how he was very unpopular during his time in Israel, and how what he thought it is actually quite different from the neo-Kahanism that now exists, which is equally mixed in with this other thing called Kookeanism from two rabbis, father and son, who are way more into basically millenarian waiting-for-the-end-times, rather than Kahane's, like, practical fascism.
I'd mostly recommend it but it was a slog towards the end.
A gift received on the first night of Hanukkah, 2022. :)
